High Ambitions

When I was in high school, there was a girl in the class below me who ice-skated. Needless to say, she was one of those annoying people who got straight-As, and her parents were both surgeons. Well, technically her mother was a surgeon in the sense that she actually cut into human beings, whilst her father was a tree surgeon (yes, that’s an actual thing) who made his fortune from the cyclones that would rip through Western Australian gardens every winter, but the way Swee Ling would go on about it, you had to feel sorry for her because she was obviously over-compensating. 

Anyway, the point is, the girl was freakishly smart and gifted. And, as if life wasn’t already unfair enough, she had also hit the genetic jackpot by way of long legs, slender arms with delicate fingers, and a face so perfectly sculpted I swear people would, today, take a screen shot of off Facebook and bring to their plastic surgeon and say, “I want these cheekbones and that nose!”

As for her ice-skating…the girl was going places. Everybody said so. And by everybody, I mean her mother, Auntie Mui who was in my mother’s mahjong group. 

“Swee Ling’s coach says she’s so gifted,” she would say, for instance, right after she’d ponged the whole table. “She’s almost perfected the triple sachow! The coach says that if Swee Ling hadn’t gone off to Paris during the holidays to practise her French, she would have landed that jump by now!”

It was the sort of child boasting you hear at every mahjong table around the world, but what made Auntie Mui particularly galling was the fact that the other ladies at the table had all, by some odd turn of fortune, given birth to children who’d done nothing but grow up and bring unending shame on the family.

Auntie June’s middle child, for instance, had just been diagnosed as a pyromaniac – a shocking diagnosis that Mother said made her glad we didn’t live next door. “This whole house is made of wood! Can you imagine?”

Meanwhile, Auntie Diana’s eldest daughter was dating the newspaper boy – something Auntie Diana put a stop to as soon as she found out, but she lived to regret it because twenty years later, Daniel became a super-rich hedge fund tycoon and named his mega-yacht after his mother-in-law. “That could have been me!” she would tell my mother who could only cluck in sympathy.  

Meanwhile, my sister was going through her Goth phase, I had undiagnosed short-sightedness so I was always walking into walls and failing exams, while my brother Jack, at age 7, insisted he could see dead people. Which also explained why after a while, Mother’s mahjong sessions were always held at Auntie June’s house. Who could blame them when Jack would wander into the mahjong room and stare at a spot two inches above Auntie Diana’s shoulder and smile like he’d just bumped into his best friend. 

“So what happened to this Swee Ling?” Amanda asked the other day at home as we all watched a replay of Nathan Chen’s short programme at the world championships. “My God, he’s so good!”

“His triple axels are flawless,” I said as I absent mindedly dipped a hand into the bowl of popcorn. “Swee Ling? Oh, during practice one day, she attempted a quod, landed badly, broke her ankle, and that was the end of her career.”

Saffy gasped. She hit pause on the laptop and turned to me. “Oh my God! That’s horrible!”

I shrugged. “I wouldn’t feel too sorry for her,” I told her. “Now that she didn’t have to spend three hours a day practising, she put all that extra time into her studies and graduated top of her class. She went to Harvard and became the youngest partner in Morgan Stanley in New York. Then she married a plastic surgeon, so she’s going to look gorgeous for the rest of her life. And meanwhile, all her children are Mensa geniuses. At least that’s what Auntie Mui tells everyone at mahjong.”

Amanda sat back in her chair and pouted. “Seriously, who are these people?”

“I know, right?” I said, helping myself to another handful of popcorn. “I still take the bus!”

Saffy had been silent for a while, staring at the frozen screenshot of Nathan Chen in mid-triple-lutz. “So how old is Nathan Chen?” she suddenly asked. “Is it just me, or is he seriously cute?”

As Amanda later said to me, this is exactly the sort of thing that people make award-winning investigative documentaries about. 

Head Space

I’ve been going to yoga classes for years now and despite all my best efforts, I’ve never been able to do a headstand. Which makes it sound like I’m a pro at the Crow and the Peacock postures, and that it’s just the headstand that’s missing from my comprehensive yogic repertoire. 

The truth is, I’m barely competent at even the standing postures. I still get confused between Warrior 1 and Warrior 2. The forward fold continues to elude me – whilst everyone else in the class can place their entire palms on the ground next to their feet, it was a real moment of triumph the day I managed to connect all ten finger tips to the mat.

And so you can imagine what a hurdle the headstand has been for me. What a torment every time the teacher announces, “Now, sirshasana, everyone!” My chest deflates, my spine slumps, and my mouth droops. 

In class, there’s a group that gets down on their knees and instantly, they’re upside down, rigid like a popsicle. And they can stay like that all day. 

Meanwhile, another group goes up against the wall, and suddenly, they’re upside down too – though in yoga politics, I get the sense that people who need the wall for a headstand are regarded as second-class citizens. 

Me…I struggle even with the wall. Over the years, teachers have tried their best with me. “You’re collapsing on your shoulders!” one sighed. “Stick your chest out,” said another. “Pull your stomach in!” “Lift your legs higher!” “Tighten your thighs!”

“Why do you torment yourself?!” Saffy once asked. 

“I really want to be able to do it!”

Her bosom inflated to a dangerous volume. “How will doing a headstand make your life better?”

I tried to explain that it wasn’t about making my life better. That lately, I’d realized that as I’ve gotten older, I’m not learning anything new. 

In school, you were always learning. And for years, you never stopped. Every day, something new was inserted into your brain. And then one day, you find yourself watching Dr Pimple Popper and wondering if this is what life is all about. Somewhere between your first job and Kim Kardashian’s feud with Taylor Swift, you’ve stopped learning. 

And then, some random thing like a headstand pops up and suddenly, that’s all you care about. 

“You are so incredibly strange!” Saffy told me. 

A couple of weeks ago, I bumped into my friend Vivienne. She’s a hot shot hotel executive who, a few years ago, took time off work, shaved her head and became a yoga instructor. Of course, I immediately began moaning about my lack of progress with the headstand.

“You must come to this great school I go to!” she said. “It’s in Serangoon Gardens. They have inversion classes, and they do headstands and variations for beginners!”

Which is how, a few days later, I found myself at Yoga Kalari in a room full of pretty young women who were contorting themselves into unimaginable poses. And it was all so quiet, too. No one spoke. Just a lot of quiet movement. All you needed was some steam, some sticky goo, and it would have been exactly like that scene where Ripley stumbles into the egg pod room in ‘Aliens’, and all the eggs start hatching. I was scared out of my wits. 

“Are you mad?!” I hissed at Vivienne who was currently serenely upside down. “This is a basic inversion class?” But before she could reply, the master came around. He sat on a mat and pointed at a spot in front of him. 

“Come!” he commanded. “Put your head down here. Put your hands like this. Now lift your hips. Move your legs closer. Closer! Closer! Lift your hips! Lift!”

And suddenly, I was upside down. Swaying like a drunk – back and forth and sideways – and I would have toppled over any number of times, but the master calmly nudged my hips with a finger to steady me, and at one stage, I was in a full unassisted headstand for, like, three seconds.

“Now practise against the wall,” the master said as he moved onto the Alien hatchlings.

I can’t begin to describe what that class represented to me. After all these years, someone, with minimal words and a few finger jabs, had achieved what none of the teachers before had managed to teach me. And finally, I had learnt something new. 

I went back to Yoga Kalari the following week, and by the end of the lesson, I was, admittedly in a very wobbly way, getting up into the posture unassisted. But still…I beamed for days.

Saffy says the next thing I need to learn is to get a life. 

Job Satisfaction

I read somewhere once that in their lifetime, Millennials will have between ten to 20 different careers. And that doesn’t mean promotions in the same job or field, so that you might start out as a bookkeeper when you’re 23 and by the time you’re 65, you’re an auditor.

No, it means a Millennial might graduate with a law degree, and then in her 20s, decides she wants to be a baker, a farmer at 35, a drummer at 40, a journalist at 45 and, by the time she’s 65, she’s a junior dog groomer. 

Apparently, this is a real thing, but leave it to my mother to announce that this kind of nonsense can only happen if you haven’t moved out of home by the time you’re 25.

“You know what keeps a person in the same job?” she asked the other day during lunch at Crystal Jade. A perfectly manicured eyebrow lifted in disdain, though you could tell she was careful not to frown on account of the age lines she’s been careful to avoid her entire life. “Panic! Panic, that’s what. If you need a job to pay your mortgage and feed the kids, and your parents have made it perfectly clear that they’re spending all your inheritance on first-class round the world trips, you can bet you won’t be ditching your law degree to become a baker!”

As my sister Michelle later pointed out, it was really amazing how Mother could place such an inflection on the word ‘baker’ that she gave it the kind of emotional resonance you normally associate with a conversation about a hooker with a troubling yeast infection. 

“I mean, lookat you!” she said.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but I don’t have a troubling yeast infection!”

Michelle giggled. “I meant you gave up law and became a writer. You haven’t turned out so bad.”

“Which reminds me,” I said, “can I borrow two hundred bucks? It’s my turn to buy groceries this week.”

Michelle stopped in her tracks. “Seriously?”

Later, as I was browsing the cereal aisle at Cold Storage, I remembered the old lady in my Accounting 100 course back in my university days. I say she was old, but she was probably in her 50s at the time, but when you’re 18 years old, 50 might as well be time for the hospice. 

Anyway, every Tuesday and Thursday mornings, this lady would slip into the lecture hall. Dressed in sensible heels, dress falling below her knees and wearing a light cardigan, she’d sit quietly in the front row. And because she always came in a few seconds before the lecture began, she never spoke to anyone and as soon as it was over, she’d disappear just as quickly out the door. 

Well, it wasn’t till our second year when several classmates transferred to medicine that we realized the quiet ‘old lady’ from Accounting 100 was, in fact, the Med School’s head of surgery. Apparently, she took lectures on consolidated balance sheets and inventory aging as a way to destress and to learn something new. Which, to a 19-year-old, made absolutely no sense at all. 

Though my friend Jane recently announced that she was giving her journalism career a bit of a break. “I’m going to do private home dining!” she said with a level of enthusiasm that caused Saffy to remark she’d always found Jane a bit weird and here was proof. 

“Why would you invite complete strangers into your house and cook for them?” she asked.

“Cause you could clear a thousand dollars a night,” I told her. 

Saffy’s eyes widened. “My God, is that how much Jane’s making? Hey, maybe we should do that too!”

“You literally cannot make rice in our rice cooker,” Amanda said. “What makes you think you can cook an eight course dinner for ten people?”

Saffy’s bosom deflated as she saw her dreams of a thousand dollars a night evaporate under the full glare of Amanda’s reality check. “Ugh…I just hate my job so much, you have no idea! Why did I ever decide to work in HR? Seriously, I’m like a porn star who shows up for work only because there’s work. And there’s free cookies between takes.”

Amanda says there must be a bug in the air because she just found out her friend Joanne is quitting her auditors job to start a new career in clinical psychology.

“Emotional traumas and neuroses? That’s going to make her happier?” I asked.

Amanda shrugged. “I guess it’s all relative. Out there somewhere is a porn star dreaming of a much more fulfilling life as an HR executive.”

Child Proof

It seems only yesterday that my god-daughter, Mina was born. When I first saw her, she was a bundle of wrinkled skin – her eyes shut tightly and her tiny crab-like hands clenched in the kind of vice grip a District 9 tai-tai grabbing a heavily discounted Yohji dress at a Club21 sale would recognise. She looked so delicate and precious. 

“Wait!” I told her mother. “Let me sit down first before you hand her to me. I’m petrified I’ll drop her!”

May rolled her eyes. “Oh, for goodness sakes, it’s a baby, not a Lalique vase!”

“Which, if you ask my mother, I did in fact drop when I was a child!”

May’s look of indifference was immediately replaced by one of nervous concern. “Oh, really? OK, maybe you should just sit down first, then.”

At some stage, I must have blinked because suddenly Mina is about to turn 13.

“Thirteen?” I said the other day on FaceTime with May. “How is she turning 13? Didn’t you just give birth to her?”

May’s image sighed. “Scary, isn’t it? I have no idea what happened. And she’s turned so sassy! She’s always rolling her eyes at me!”

“So what are y0u getting for her birthday present?”

May rolled her eyes.

It turns out that a few months ago, Mina’s baby brother Johann turned ten and his parents had asked him what hewanted for his birthday.

He turned his lovely almond-shaped eyes up at them and announced that he wanted nothing. His parents were bewildered. This, after all, was the child who, when asked the same question the previous Christmas, had said he wanted to go on the Virgin Galactic flight to space with Richard Branson. “It only costs $250,000!” he said, adding with the kind of economic precision that bodes well for a future in financing, “US dollars!”

And now he wanted nothing. 

“What do you mean nothing?” his parents asked.

“I already have everything I need. I don’t need more stuff!”

“A new iPad?” his father ventured.

“My old one still works.”

“A game station?”

“No.”

May hesitated. “A new bike?”

Limpid brown eyes stared up at her. “No.”

“Who are you?” his father said eventually.

It turns out that Johann had just binge watched Marie Kondo’s ‘Tidying Up’ and YouTube clips of ‘Hoarding’ and, in the process, the boy has developed a severe phobia of, well, stuff. May reports that since that conversation, he essentially emptied out his room, and reduced himself to just three items of everything. Three books, three underwear, three toys…

“His room echoes!” May said the other day. 

“What a strange child,” I said.

“Actually, I’m quite proud of him. I was so scared he would turn out to be grasping and materialistic.” Here she paused and then added with a dramatic flourish, “Like your god-daughter!”

It seems that when Mina’s parents asked her what she wanted for her birthday, they’d been half hoping that, like her brother, she would also say, “Nothing.”

Instead, the girl pulled out a piece of A4 paper on which was neatly typed in Georgia 12-pitch a long list of birthday presents, at the top of which was an a trip to Disney World. 

“And not the one in Tokyo, mind you!” May said. “She wants to go to the one in Orlando, Florida!”

I leaned closer towards the phone screen. “What else is on the list?”

May’s features hardened. “I’m so glad you asked. Because number two is a trip to Paris. With you. Not with us – the people who have fed her, clothed her, wiped up her drool and vomit, and generally cost us a fortune. Not with me, the mother who literally pushed her out into the world. No. She wants to go to Paris with someone she sees once a year! What’s wrong with this picture?”

I shrugged. “It’s not my fault your child gets along with me better than she does with you. That’s so incredibly sweet. Well, clearly, Disney and Paris with her beloved god-father isn’t happening. What else does the Golden Child want?”

“A Tiffany charm bracelet, a party dress sewn with Swarovski crystals, a French bulldog puppy, and at the bottom of the list is an iPad Pro. She’s getting the iPad.”

Mina later WhatsApped to say she’d made a deal with Johann that she would give him her iPad which she’d got for her last birthday because she wanted the new iPad Pro. “I really like the retina recognition function and the new one has it. But I knew Mama wouldn’t get it for me because the one I have is only a year old, so I freaked them out with Disney World and Paris with you, and put the iPad Pro at the bottom of the list. So that’s what I got! I love it!”

“Really,” I told Saffy. “Children are so devious !”